You look like the kind of girl I see walking on Valencia sometimes. I’m not sure if you’re a dyke or not, but you definitely look like you might be. I’m the guy walking around in the hoodie. I haven’t shaved in three or four days, I’m wearing a bookbag, and my hands are constantly jammed in my pockets. You’ve seen me before. I’m always wearing these ridiculous headphones, I’m always in jeans, and the jeans always have holes, either in the knees or the bottoms. I walk with a glazed over look on my face. This is intentional. I pay special attention to two things as I walk through the Mission — girls and people who want to scar my pretty face with a broken bottle. I look at you until I get within about twenty feet, and then I focus my eyes to the ground and relax my body as we pass on the street. I don’t want to creep you out, but I know by context you’ll go into alert-female mode as soon as I get near. I don’t want to bother you. I wear gloves with holes in the ends exposing my fingertips. Occasionally, people believe I’m a homeless person, but I don’t have a pock-marked face. My gloves are practical, my clothing is comfortable, and shaving hurts. Nobody remembers what Shakespeare wore on a day to day basis. Newton? Well, I guess he wore pants. Caesar? He wore . . . expensive pants? Toga Candida?
You’re slim. You look like a flapper or a punk. Maybe you call it “retrogothic princess.” Maybe you look exactly like me except you have more vagina and less facial hair. Maybe you look like a hippy. Perhaps today you’re dressed up in business casual. I don’t care how you present yourself. I look boring and shitty most of the time. I could wear a suit. I’ve got plenty. I could wear a unique suit every single day for month. Dry cleaning bill would be a bitch though, and I hate doing laundry. I’m way more interested in what you have to say and how you say it. I can’t know these things until I hear you talk, and you’re not saying much, just eyeballing me and doing quick mental calculations about where my nuts are relative to your right knee. I’m a vintage nerd ranger. I act like an old man, I have a degree in physics, and my forehead glows when Zordon needs to brief me on my next mission, where I will battle an underpaid Japanese man dressed as a gigantic sausage using nothing but an engineering calculator from the 1980s. You spend a lot of time thinking by yourself. You get really lonely at night if you’re by yourself. You day dream a lot. You have strange fantasies, but you don’t tell people about them. You’re really good at learning, which is a gift and a curse. A gift because you’re good at everything. A curse because once you start reading about Peruvian soil, you don’t stop, and 200 pages later you’re thinking about the most appropriate Wikipedia search terms to find parallels between recent mining activity in the Congo and colonial Spanish practices in Latin America.
When I passed by, I wanted you to smile and say Hi! to me, to give me a hug and talk to me. But you didn’t. I could assume that you already have a boyfriend or a girlfriend or maybe just a guy you have sex with every week, every few days, sometimes twice in a day — actually, he was walking next to you a few days ago when we first crossed paths. Wait, was that your brother? You looked kind of similar. Maybe similar people just find each other attractive? I don’t know everything, but I do know that way more attractive people are single than I’m currently led to believe. Yes, I could’ve said hello, smiled my cute smile, introduced myself. Sometimes I try that, but it usually doesn’t work. I have tendency to say things that people don’t know how to respond to. And that’s really okay. Most people don’t care about strategies for hypothetical presidential primaries. Most people don’t care about generating graphs and data charts automatically by scraping data from Craigslist. It’s kind of boring, I guess, if you’re not a little nerdy in the head. I’ve come to accept oddity as a personal asset.
I’m tired of this scenario happening over and over again. I’m tired of writing Craigslist posts and hoping that cute girls respond. The reality? Gay men respond, and they’re looking to bone me in the ass, or stuff my dick in their mouth/ass. And that sucks. I’m not a lone weirdo. I have plenty of friends, female friends. But I have really high aspirations to develop a remarkably close relationship, and the right person to satisfy those ambitions isn’t in my life right now. So I’m going to have to try something different. And since you’d never talk to me on your own, and I’d never approach you because I’d be rejected, the current system is clearly F.U.B.A.R. And your needs? Well, you don’t get the strangeness in your life that you crave so badly. I know you don’t want to admit it. But when it comes down to it, there aren’t that many people who make you think. No need to fret, worry, or fear — I’ve come up with the perfect solution.
I’m going to kidnap you and wait until you develop Stockholm Syndrome. You might think that you’ll remain defiant until the end. You might think that “the Uterus never forgets,” and you’ll always be mad at me for kidnapping you. You might think that you could never love someone who’d resort to violence. But you’d be wrong. The uterus is all about accepting fertilized eggs. It got a really low GRE score. It’s like the blond girl in class who asks if she can ask a question. And violence? Well, I’m not a violent person. I’d kidnap you entirely with pillows scented with rose water. You’re allergic to rose water? I’ll draw a hot oatmeal bath to soothe the rash. You’re allergic to oatmeal? I’ll paint little faces on the oat meal bits, give you a safety pin, and you can stab them, vengefully. Don’t want to stab the oatmeal bits because you’ve sworn to yourself that you’ll be defiant until the bitter end? That really takes a lot of effort. It gets boring and unpleasant. I wouldn’t kidnap an unpleasant person. What’s the point? Defiance could be seen as connected with pride. Confidence. Self worth. At some point though, resistance will simply become a blinder, like on a race horse, and you’ll miss the exit for the fertile grounds of self improvement offered by being kidnapped.
One moment, you’ll be standing on a street corner next to a store that sell jeans for $300 a pair. The next minute you’re shoved into a rolling suitcase with a padded interior, and you can hear the the click of the wheels as they cross cracks in the pavement. You’ll scream, but the suitcase will make the exact opposite noise of a scream, so nobody will hear you. You’ll get bored. Wait, what’s that painful lump beneath your ass? A gameboy. Well, I guess you better play mario while you wait for this creep to let you out. You’re going to yell at him so hard he turns into a petunia. But see, I’ve had nagging girlfriend before. The first one would throw her cell phone and punch me every time she got mad. Later ones would cane me until I got purple ridges on my ass. It’s okay to feel angry after you’ve been shoved into a suitcase, and I know you have to express your feelings later somehow.
I’ll keep you in a room specifically created for the purpose. I’ll call it the kidnapping room. When I have guests over, I’ll warn them not to go near it, because it contains an understandably pissed off female who will probably yell at them. My guests will nod knowingly, and tell me how clever I am to have constructed a room just for this purpose. I haven’t built it yet, but if I don’t go on a date soon, I’ll definitely have enough time on my hands. It’ll have to have a lot of pillows. And an exercise wheel. And maybe a clear plastic tunnel that goes up and over my building and then back in the other side. Translucent blue? And one of those watering things with the ball at the end. Yeah. You look so cute when you poke it with your finger and then your eyes get huge as a torrent of water flows down and soaks your entire body. I’ll provide you with books to read. I’ll get treats for you from boutique food sources. Cheese with names that I’ll never be able to pronounce because I missed a vital stage in French language development. Sake that tastes like cherry when you lick your teeth. Dessert wine that tastes like oranges but is somehow made from grapes (wtf!?). I might even kidnap another girl if you begin gnawing at yourself and I see that your hair is falling out. Of course, then your periods might align, but then I’d have to clean it less often. I wonder if you prefer tampons. Diva cups are pretty gross. My friend uses them to fertilize her plants. Blegh. I’ll subject you to all the things that I like doing. Which means you’d be hearing some cheesy emotional music from a really nice sound system. You’d only feed you fruit juice *not* from concentrate. You’ll read novels by authors with big vocabularies. No internet access. You’d occasionally tie yourself down, and I’d sit on your back and give you a massage. But I wouldn’t fuck you. It’s not a priority, and trapped in a room with books by Nabokov, you’ll get sexually frustrated soon enough, and I have good taste in vibrators. I like nice feet and hands, so one way or another, you’d get a manicure and a pedicure with high frequency. And I’d give you a foot massage, because I get off on that kind of thing.
Your social life would shrink to . . . well, to me. This is where the “if you were the last man on earth” paradigm becomes relevant, since for all practical purposes, I would be. I’d use the opportunity to find out everything I could about you. How you think, what you think, why you think. What you want out of life and what you’ve already gotten. Those things interest me. And how good is it — you get to read all day. And look at your pretty feet! You don’t have to prepare food, go to the grocery store, or pay for anything. You never have to worry about what you’re going to do at night. You don’t have to pay for a gym membership. Eventually, you’d love me. Not because you’d know anything about me. Not because you’re infatuated with my fabulous body, my mysterious eyes, or my charming demeanor. You’d love me because I’d be the only thing around. And in a world where people fuck based on penis size. In a world where people measure the value of relationships by an ambiguous future potential based on a hormonal infatuation. I find this “love by default” more or less in line with what I’m seeing in my day to day life.
Life in a room full of pillows, reading, getting soaked, running on the wheel and crawling through the blue translucent tube. It gets old after a while. I’m not cruel, so I’d release you back into the wild after a month. And you’d still have no idea who I was, what I looked like. You might go to the police, but there’d be no information of value. And maybe you’d throw-up for a few years every time you smelled a familiar smell from that period. Eventually, you’d meet a nice guy and get married. You’d have hot sex with him 20 times a day, be madly in love. Then the flame would die, and you’d stay with him because you’re comfortable with each other and now you have kids. Then one day, you’ll be 60, and he’ll be 62. He’ll complain about a pain in his stomach, and minutes later he’ll be dead. Of course you’ll be crying, since he was a decent guy, or at least as decent as you. And then one day you’ll be on old lady walking past a flower stand, and you’ll smell pillows. You’ll remember pillows. Your eyes will tear up, but you’re not quite sure why. Are you still sad about your husband? Are you still upset about what happened to you? Are you lonely and just remembering nostalgically things in the past that surely seem better now than they must’ve been then? I don’t know. I’m certainly not saying that at 60, you’ll wish that you’d stayed in my room. But at least you’d have an adventure to brag about at the ladies’ bridge club on Sundays.
Anyway, if this sounds like the kind of thing you’re into, e-mail me back and maybe we can arrange something. I’d never kidnap someone randomly. That’s just rude.
